Christopher Edmunds

Christopher Montague Edmunds (26 November 1899 – 2 January 1990) was an English composer, academic and organist who lived and worked in Birmingham. Edmunds was born in Small Heath, Birmingham. After serving as a young soldier in the war, he studied music with Granville Bantock at the Birmingham School of Music and went on to teach there from 1929 under Bantock. In 1945 he became Principal of the School (following Dr A.K. Blackall who had succeeded Bantock in 1934), a position he held until 1956. He was organist and choirmaster at Aston Parish Church from the 1930s until 1957. His most popular composition remains the Sonatina for recorder and piano which has always stayed in print. A song, The Bellman was performed twice at The Proms, in 1929 and 1931. But he also composed widely for the choral festival movement in the 1920s and 1930s, and produced two significant works foreshadowing the war: the B minor Piano Sonata and the Symphony No 2. The Sonata was premiered by Tom Bromley in Birmingham in May 1938. It was recorded for the first time in 2021 by Duncan Honeybourne. Lewis Foreman has called the Second Symphony “a notable example of music responding to the challenges of the war i